'We can't protect public from cyber crimes': RCMP boss

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson bluntly warned Canadians Wednesday that legal restraints on police access to personal Internet data means there is no guarantee they can help victims of cyber crimes.

Speaking to a security and defence industry conference in Ottawa, Paulson said an explosion in Internet crime, combined with laws restricting police online criminal investigations, means people should avoid the Internet or enter it knowing the potential risks.

“Your safety, your family’s safety, your financial integrity is at risk and so we need to start having the conversation now” about giving police reasonable, new and warrantless powers to collect evidence – often personal information – from online sources, such as basic subscriber data from telecommunication companies, he said.

“Because fundamentally, ladies and gentlemen, it’s hard to keep people safe on the Internet right now. The best advice we can give people is, ‘Don’t go (on the Internet),’ which is not really working, or ‘If you go, be really, really, really careful.’

“And if something bad happens, hopefully we’ll be able to help you, but there’s no guarantee.”

Privacy concerns have handcuffed what police can – and mostly can’t – do to investigate crimes committed through the Internet or traditional crimes where potential evidence resides in the cyber domain.

In a landmark 2014 judgment, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled police need judicial authorization to obtain subscriber data linked to online activities, such as a person’s name, phone number and Internet Protocol address.

The high court rejected the notion the federal privacy law governing companies allowed them to hand over subscriber identities voluntarily. Before the decision, law-enforcement agencies submitted hundreds of thousands of warrantless requests for such data annually to telecoms, which complied in most cases.

Telecoms and other service providers, such as banks and rental companies, now demand court approval for nearly all types of requests from authorities for basic identifying information.

“I’m all for warrantless access to subscriber info,” said Paulson. “If I had to get a judge on the phone every time I wanted to run a licence plate when I was doing my policing, there wouldn’t have been much policing getting done.”

Criminals, he said, are now livestreaming child sexual assaults being committed in order to avoid leaving digital evidence on the web. Billions of dollars of criminal proceeds are laundered through the Internet. Multi-national criminal organizations are effectively running their affairs on the Internet. There are countless bank frauds, identity thefts, credit-card frauds, extortions, sextortions, drug trafficking and more.

“That is where we need to take this conversation, to say ‘We can’t have people exploiting our citizens to the extent that they do.’ Children in the child exploitation world are being hurt at a pace and a frequency that is alarming,” he said. “People can encrypt their communications and they can exploit children for sexual purposes and it’s a little harder to get at them from a police point of view.”

Public mistrust over police poking around online compounds the problem, he said.

“In the information-management world where privacy now is driving a lot of the concerns around the state wheeling into a community’s information, we’re just simply not trusted, the police are not trusted to manage that information.”

Yet people consent to be policed in other realms. “At airports, people know what they have to do to get on an airplane; line up, empty your pockets, take off your shoes, your belt. And people do that because they understand what’s going on there. It’s intrusive, but they get it.”

Paulson was once an RCMP patrolman in Chilliwack, B.C. “I couldn’t keep those people safe if I didn’t know who they are, if they went about their business day in and day out with masks on, or driving vehicles with licence plates covered up, or leaving phone numbers that could never be looked up, or living in houses that didn’t have addresses, on streets without names, I couldn’t do the job of policing in that context.”

Yet that is the reality of Internet crime-fighting today, he said. “It’s a very difficult proposition to bring the traditional criminal justice strategies to bear in a place where anonymity is protected.

We’ll abide nothing that can remotely be seen to be interfering with privacy.”

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